单选题The author's attitude towards Barber's theory in Fear's Empire can be best described as

单选题Marriage may be about love, but divorce is a business. For global couples—born in different countries, married in a third, now working somewhere else and with children, pensions and other assets sprinkled over the world—a contested divorce is bliss for lawyers and a nightmare for others. Divorce laws vary wildly, from countries (such as Malta) that still forbid it to Islamic states where—for the husband, at least—it may be obtained in minutes. Rules on the division of property and future financial obligations vary hugely, too. France expects the poorer party, usually the wife, to start fending for herself almost immediately; England and some American states insist on lifelong support. Some systems look only at the "acquest"; others count the lot. A few, like Austria, still link cash to blame. Japan offers a temptingly quick cheap break, but—for foreigners—little or no enforceable contact with the kids thereafter, notes Jeremy Morley, a New York-based '"international divorce strategist". Other places may be mum-friendly when it comes to money but dad-friendly on child custody. The European Union is trying to tidy up its divorce laws. A reform in 2001 called Brussels Ⅱ tried to stop forum shopping, in which each party sought the most favorable jurisdiction, by ruling that the first court to be approached decides the divorce. That worked—but at the cost of encouraging trigger-happy spouses to kill troubled marriages quickly, rather than trying to patch them up. This, says David Hodson, a specialist in international divorce law, favors the "wealthier, more aggressive, more unscrupulous party". It goes against the general trend towards counseling, mediation and out- of-court settlement. An EU measure called Rome Ⅲ, now under negotiation and penciled in to come into force in 2008, tries to ensure that the marriage is ended by the law that has governed it most closely. It may be easy for a Dutch court to apply Belgian law when dealing with the uncontested divorce of a Belgian couple, but less so for a Spanish court to apply Polish rules, let alone Iranian or Indonesian, and especially not when the divorce is contested. Such snags make Rome Ⅲ "laughably idiotic-a recipe for increasing costs", according to John Cornwell, a London lawyer. Britain and Ireland Say they will opt out. That, says Mr. Hodson, will give a further edge to London. Since a judgment in 2000 entrenched the principle of "equality" in division of marital assets, England, home to hundreds of thousands of expatriates, has become a "Mecca for wives", says Louise Spitz of Manches, a London law firm. David Truex, who runs a specialist international divorce outfit, reckons that at least a fifth of divorce cases registered in London's higher courts now have an international element. For the typical global couple, such high-profile, big-money cases matter less than the three basic (and deeply unromantic factors) in marriage planning. According to Mr. Truex, a rich man should choose his bride from a country with a stingy divorce law, such as Sweden or France, and marry her there. Second, he should draw up a pre-nuptial agreement. These are binding in many countries and have begun to count even in England. Third, once divorce looms, a wife may want to move to England or America (but should avoid no-alimony states such as Florida); for husbands, staying in continental Europe is wise. Outside Europe, the country—or American State—deemed the most "appropriate" in terms of the couple's family and business connections will normally get to hear the case. But here too unilateral action may be decisive. When Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana, divorced his first wife, he surprised her by issuing proceedings in South Africa where they were then living. In England, where they had been domiciled, she might have got better deal. She ended up suing her lawyers. The lesson for couples? How you live may determine the length and happiness of your marriage. Where you live is likely to determine how it ends,

单选题 It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently - {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}qualitatively but quantitatively - how the world works. We might {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 108 elementary particles that {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}as massive as the universe. It seems {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}that such a universe could have life and intelligence, because being and brains {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}some degree of internal stability and order. But {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy. {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}us to understand something of the workaday world. When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}highly unreliable guides. It is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}indefinitely, we shrink toward zero thickness {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}the direction of motion, and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would like. Many people think that this is silly, and every week {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it. But it is virtually certain consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein's {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}analysis of space and time called the Special Theory of Relativity. It does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We are not {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities. The idea that the world places restrictions on {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}humans might do is frustrating. Why shouldn't we be able to have intermediate rotational positions? Why can't we {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}faster than the speed of light? But {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}we can tell, this is the way the universe is constructed. Such prohibitions not only {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}us toward a little humility; they also make the world more knowable.

单选题 The fridge is considered necessary. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food list appeared with the label: "Store in the refrigerator." In my fridgeless fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthy. The milkman came every day, the grocer, the butcher (肉商), the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times each week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus (剩余) bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country. The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. Many well-tried techniques already existed—natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling... What refrigeration did promote was marketing—marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the world in search of a good price. So most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the rich countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house—while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge. The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been not important. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may not eat the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

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单选题According to the passage which is most important?

单选题Britain's east midlands were once the picture of English countryside, alive With flocks, shepherds, skylarks and buttercups--the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed, and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks are now rare. "Farmers kill anything that affects production, "says Marsh. "Agriculture is too efficient." Anecdotal evidence of a looming Crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40 years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies ate the furthest along-71 percent of Britain's 58 species are shrinking in number, and some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain's grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species are on the path to extinction. There's hardly a corner of the country's ecology that isn't affected by this downward spiral. The problem would be bad enough if it were merely local, but it's not: because Britain's temperate ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it's the best microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded alarms about species' extinction in the past, but always specific to a particular animal or place--whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a "biodiversity hot spot" with a unique ecology. But in Britain, "the main drivers of change are the same processes responsible for species' declines worldwide, 'says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world's species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousand deaths--from overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogefi is released when fossil fuels burn in cars and power plants-but also when ecologically rich heath-lands are plowed and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global implications. Wildlife is getting blander. "We don't know which species are essential to the web of life so we're taking a massive risk by eliminating any of them, " say's David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska. Chances are we'll be seeing the results of this experiment before too long.

单选题What can we learn from the passage?

单选题The writer' s attitude towards the use of a computer can be best described as

单选题When was the deadly avian flu first discovered in humans in the world?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Bold-faced, with a hyphen and ending in the adjectival, was coined by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part I, when Lord Talbot, rescuing his son on a French battlefield, spoke of his "proud desire of bold-faced Victoria. " It was picked up in the 19th century by typesetters to describe a type — like Clarendon, Antique or a thick version of Bodoni — that stood out confidently, even impudently, from the page. The adjective was used in an 1880 article in The New York Times (we were hyphenated then) : "One of the handbills" distributed by the Ku Klux Klan, noted a disapproving reporter, was "printed in bold-faced type on yellow paper". Newspaper gossip columnists in the 30's, to catch the reader's eye, began using this bold type for the names that made news in what was then called "care society" (in contrast to "high" society, whose members claimed to prefer to stay out of those columns). In our time, the typeface metaphor was applied to a set of famous human faces. A fashion reporter — John Duka of The Times — was an early user of the phrase, as he wrote acerbically on Sept. 22, 1981: "At the overheated parties at Calvin Klein's apartment, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and Studio 54, the boldfaced names said the week had been so crammed that they were feeling 'a little under the breath, you know. ' " Rita Kempley of The Washington Post noted in 1987 the sought-after status of "a boldfaced name in People magazine"; by 1999, Alan Peppard of The Dallas Morning News recalled to Texas Monthly that he began with a "social column," but "now we live in an age of celebrity, and there are very few people who care about what the debutantes are doing. So I call it celebrity, society, famous people, rich people, boldfaced names. " The New York Times, which never had, does not have and is grimly determined never to have a "gossip column" introduced a "people column" in 2001. (When its current editor, Joyce Wadler, took a six-week break recently, she subheaded that item with a self-mocking "Air Kiss! Smooch! Ciao!") The column covers the doings of celebrities, media biggies, fashion plates, show-biz stars, haut-monde notables, perennial personages and others famous for their fame. It's confident, fashionable and modern moniker became the driving force behind the recent popularization of the phrase with the former compound adjective, now an attributive noun: Boldface Names.

单选题 Questions 11--13 are based on the following passage about the London Marathon. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11--13.

单选题Beside Stroke Mandeville, surely the games for the disabled were once held in ______.

单选题Why will American need to expoit food in 1997?

单选题BPassage 4/B 　　Sex prejudices are based on and justified by the ideology that biology is destiny. According to this ideology, basic biological and psychological differences exist between the sexes. These differences require each sex to play a separate role in social life. Women are the weaker sex both physically and emotionally. Thus, they are naturally suited, much more so than men, to the performance of domestic duties. A woman's place, under normal circumstances, is within the protective environment of the home. Nature has determined that women play caretaker roles, such as wife and mother and homemaker. On the other hand, men are best suited to go out into the competitive world of work and politics where serious responsibilities must be taken on. Men are to be the providers; women and children are "dependents."　　The ideology also holds that women who wish to work outside the household should naturally fill those jobs that are in line with the special capabilities of their sex. It is thus appropriate for women, not men, to be employed as nurses, social workers, elementary school teachers, household helpers, and clerks and secretaries.　　These positions are simply an extension of women's domestic role. Informal distinctions between "women's work" and "men's work" in the labor force, according to the ideology, are simply a functional reflection of the basic differences between the sexes.　　Finally, the ideology suggests that nature has worked her will in another significant way. For the human species to survive over time, its members must regularly reproduce. Thus, women must, whether at home or in the labor force, make the most of their physical appearance.　　So goes the ideology. It is, of course, not true that basic biological and psychological differences between the sexes require each to play sex-defined roles in social life. There is ample evidence that sex roles vary from society to society, and those role differences are largely learned.　　But to the degree people actually believe that biology is destiny and that nature intended for men and women to make different contributions to society, sex-defined roles will be seen as totally acceptable.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The lives of very few Newark residents are untouched by violence. New Jersey's biggest city has seen it all. Yet the murder of three young people, who were forced to kneel before being shot in the back of the head in a school playground on August 4th, has shaken the city. A fourth, who survived, was stabbed and shot in the face. The four victims were by all accounts good kids, all enrolled in college, all with a future. But the cruel murder, it seems, has at last forced Newarkers to say they have had enough. Grassroots organizations, like Stop Shooting, have been flooded with offers of help and support since the killings. Yusef Ismail, its co-founder, says the group has been going door-to-door asking people to sign a pledge of non-violence. They hope to get 50,000 to promise to "stop shooting, start thinking, and keep living. " The Newark Community Foundation, which was launched last month, announced on August 14th that it will help pay for Community Eye, a surveillance system tailored towards gun crime. Cory Booker, who became mayor 13 months ago with a mission to revitalize the city, believes the surveillance program will be the largest camera and audio network in any American city. More than 30 cameras were installed earlier this summer and a further 50 will be installed soon in a seven-square-mile area where 80% of the city's recent shootings have occurred. And more cameras are planned. When a gunshot is detected, the surveillance camera zooms in on that spot. Similar technology in Chicago has increased arrests and decreased shootings. Mr Booker plans to announce a comprehensive gun strategy later this week. Mr Booker, as well as church leaders and others, believes (or hopes) that after the murder the city will no longer stand by in coldness. For generations, New, ark has been paralyzed by poverty—almost one in three people lives below the poverty line—and growing indifference to crime. Some are skeptical. Steve Malanga of the conservative Manhattan Institute notes that Newark has deep social problems: over 60% of children are in homes without fathers. The school system, taken over by the state in 1995, is a mess. But there is also some cause for hope. Since Mr Booker was elected, there has been a rise in investment and re-zoning for development. Only around 7% of nearby Newark airport workers used to come from Newark; now, a year later, the figure is 30%. Mr Booker has launched a New York style war on crime. So far this year, crime has fallen 11% and shootings are down 30% (though the murder rate looks likely to match last year's high).